Part of a series exploring how economic thought leads to cognition and cognitive behaviour
As we go about our everyday lives we are obsessed with monitoring others to check that they don’t gain a relative advantage over us:
Our boss dumps a load of work on our desk that he’s been sitting on all day, five minutes before we’re due to leave on a Friday.
A person tries to jump the queue at the supermarket or in a line of traffic.
A news item reveals how a utility company systematically overcharges its customers.
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We’re quite familiar with this reaction that we experience when others try to “pull one over” on us.
We react to the perceived unfairness and ensuing relative disadvantage we are faced with.
This reaction to unfairness isn’t unique to humans. Capuchin monkeys show a similar response. This gives us a pretty big clue that our sense of fairness is hardwired into us and it came pre-installed in the first humans.
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Several things have to happen for our fairness bias to be tripped.
Firstly, we have to be confronted with error. Evidence of confrontation of error is probably the biggest clue you have into understanding an individual’s personality. To be confronted with error a person has to have an impression of how the world works (a scenario) and have applied it to the environment in front of them (the situation). Whatever they predict is going to happen doesn’t and they are able to detect this mismatch.
– They have formed and enacted a U and the result they expected from it doesn’t materialise.
This mismatch results in a real or perceived loss of resources relative to the environment or agents within it.
The mismatch is of significant magnitude for us to feel significantly disadvantaged with respect to the environment or agents within it.
We can’t cognitively mitigate for this mismatch. For example, letting the elderly or those with disabilities get on public transport first regardless of how long they had been waiting in the queue. We’re quite happy to let a frail elderly lady on in front of us but would feel aggrieved if a teenage boy tried to push in front of us.
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Toddlers are great value when trying to spot the fairness bias in action. Okay, it’s not fun when you are a tired and harassed parent and your two-year-old is rolling around on the supermarket floor because they don’t like the colour of broccoli, but the principles are the same.
They don’t have the stored experience of the world to produce anything but broad scenarios or understand exceptions to their experience.
They produce Us with low resolution.
When a toddler throws a temper tantrum they have been confronted with error. Their understanding of the environment has been violated and they can’t resolve it.
In hindsight tantrums over the behaviour of Mister Flopsy Bunny (being ably assisted by dad) at an afternoon tea party may seem funny, but to the child they are incredibly important.
To be able to understand the environment we need to know what it is and what it isn’t
Without the experience to know what the world isn’t, a child is regularly confronted with error. They react to the perceived unfairness that it doesn’t yield to their wishes.
Emotional reactions are an attempt by an individual to orientate the environment to themselves.
When this fails, knowledge of the environment is gained. This knowledge of the world is stored so when the scenario is experienced again it can be applied.
Cognitive application of this information aligns the individual to the environment when they experience it in the future.
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This is generally why we have to fail before we succeed. We have to be wrong before we can be certain of being right.
If you can’t see how something is wrong there is a good chance you lack experience in what you are doing and it may be a good time to take a step back and evaluate.
Photo credit: © Agnieszka Ciura